Carla has loved Alex for twenty years, through their addictions to alcohol and drugs, marriages to other people and the birth of her three children. When Alex is mysteriously dumped, unconscious and injured, in an expensive Lima clinic Carla’s name is on his list of people to contact in an emergency, despite not having spoken to her for two years. What was he doing in Peru taking ayahuasca, a powerful plant that grows in the Amazon and used to heal alcoholism and drug addiction? The mysterious jungle treatment centre owner Vanesa makes a fortune from foreigners fighting addictions but is she the guardian angel she seems to be? Carla is prepared to risk everything to find out and bring him back even if it means returning to the darkness of the Peruvian rainforest where she once lived, back to the beautiful and otherworldly rituals of the shamans and the nightmares she thought she had left behind long ago. Will she be able to bring Alex back and if she does, will either of them ever be the same again?

This work is based on my own experiences of working in the rainforests of Ecuador and Peru and of living with and marrying someone from the Harakmbut tribe in south eastern Peru with whom I have two children. I now live in East London. I am 38 years old and this is my first novel.